“Now,” he said to himself, “I’ve got to have a place of my own, where I can work on my gasoline engine at night.”
“Now we can have a home of our own, and get away from this awful boarding-house,” Mrs. Ford exclaimed, when he told her the news, and he, contrasting the supper he had just eaten with memories of her excellent cooking, heartily agreed. Besides, it seemed to him that paying rent was wasting money. He proposed to buy a lot and build on it.
They talked it over, walking up and down Detroit’s wide, tree-shaded streets in the evening. Next morning early Mrs. Ford put on her hat and went down to the real estate offices. Before night two hustling young city-lot salesmen had interviewed Ford at the Edison plant, and when he came home that night another one was waiting on the boarding-house steps.
That week was a busy one. Ford worked from six in the morning to six at night in the Edison plant, hurried home to find Mrs. Ford waiting, bright-eyed with eagerness to tell him of the lots she had seen that day, and before he had finished his supper he was snatched away from it to hear an enthusiastic salesman describe still other bargains in Detroit real estate.
Impatient to be at work on his drawings for the gasoline engine, he was taken from end to end of the city to inspect homesites. He was experiencing that agony of all workers, being obliged to spend so much time preparing a place to work that there was none left for the work.
“This thing has to stop,” he said in desperation to his wife one evening. “I’ve been inquiring around a little, and I think the best place to buy is out on Edison avenue. Put on your hat and we’ll go out and decide on one of those lots we saw last Saturday.”
They went out and looked them over. On one of the lots was an old shed. Ford examined it.
“If this place suits you, we’ll take it,” he said. “This shed will make a shop without much fixing. I’ll build the gasoline engine here.”
Mrs. Ford looked about at the scattered little houses and bare lots. It was spring; the grass was beginning to sprout, and the smell of the damp earth and the feeling of space reminded her of the country. She liked it.
“All right, let’s buy this one,” she said.